Emily Study Guide
Emily Study Guide
Emily Study Guide
DICKINSON'S POETRY:
(Dr. S. Coghill 1986)
On a lighter note, and with a wit Dickinson might have appreciated, you
can go to the Dickinson random epigram generator at:
The Emily Dickinson Random Epigram Machine
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CONTENTTHEMESIMAGERY
1.
2.
3.
"truth-telling"
"renunciation" and retreat into intensity
loss, grief, death (all metaphors for loss/death of "spirit")
psychological poetwriter of the depths of human spirit
her poems of death rank among the best in the English language
the brevity of revelation and transcendence
4.
tension of immortality/mortality
temporality of human life
triviality of human existence
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
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FORM AND STRUCTURE OF HER VERSE
1.
Few radical innovations to verse forms and she rarely uses free verse.
2.
3.
5.
6.
7.
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sun
death, face
god, time
soul
heart
night
love
bird
die
eyes
bee, home
light
sky
Dividing the number of poems (1775) by the frequency of a word used, we can
get an average number of poems where theses words appear. For example,
only about every 12th poem is about death or at least has death in its
vocabulary. The majority average use imagery of light or invoke light and
related words for the sun.
CHRONOLOGICAL SEQUENCE OF POEMS AND THEIR DATE OF
COMPOSITION
Date & No. per Yr.
1850-1
1851-1
1852-1
1853-1
1854-1
1858-51
1859-93
1860-64
1861-81+3
1862-365+2
1863-142
1864-173
1865-184
1866-36+1
1867-9
1868-21
1869-16
1870-23+3
1871-27
1872-37
1873-49
1874-38+1
1875-19
1876-37+1
1877-41
1878-20+3
1879-29+1
1880-25
1881-27+2
1882-22+1
1883-33+2
1884-42
1885-9
1886-2
Undated
1104-1113
1114-1135
1136-1152
1153-1176
1177-1204
1205-1242
1243-1292
1293-1331
1332-1351
1352-1389
1390-1431
1432-1452
1453-1482
1483-1508
1509-1536
1537-1559
1560-1593
1594-1636
1637-1646
1647-1648
1649-1775
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT EMILY DICKINSON
the case, the poet has seen the manuscript through to publication.
5. What kinds of poems did she write?
According to William Shullenberger and Sharon Cameron, Emily Dickinson has characteristically stunning
or startling ways of opening poems:
Stunning or Startling Opening Examples:
"Pain has an element of blank.
"This was a Poet--It is that
"Longing is like the Seed"
Riddles, some with lack of specific referents for pronouns.
"I like to see it lap the miles"
"A narrow fellow in the grass"
Declarations: "I'm wife--I've finished that"
Additional
Landscape descriptions.
Tales, parables, allegories
Requests
Complaints
Confessions
Prayers
Sharon Cameron notes that "definition can be a way of coming to terms with a discrepancy between what
one believes and what one feels" (201).
Some poems repeat without elaborating on initial name
Some poems bring up and dismiss complex situations
In some poems, the context and conclusion may bear little relationship to
each other.
Some raise definitions to point out the speaker's knowledge of its
inadequacy.
6. How should we read Dickinson's poetry?
Speaker. Who is the speaker? What person (first, second, third) is ED speaking in? If it is the first person
plural, with whom has she aligned herself? To whom is the poem addressed?
Setting or Situation. What is the setting? Real? Abstract? What about the situation? Is there action in the
poem? What is it?
What are the verbs? What is their tense? Their mood (indicative, subjunctive, interrogative)? In what
ways does their syntax vary from what you expect? Are any of them archaic or unusual?
What is the form of the poem? Closed? Open? What is the meter? the rhyme scheme? Where does ED
depart from these patterns and forms? Why?
What elements are repeated? Inverted? Why? What instances of repetition does she use? What is the
effect of the repetition?
What figures of speech does the poem contain? metaphor? metonymy? synecdoche? personification?
extended metaphor? What kind of figure does she use as a comparison (vehicle)? Where has she used this
before and with what kinds of meaning or resonance?
What kinds of images does she use? olfactory? tactile? visual? auditory? thermal? Characteristic
Dickinson images include patterns of light/dark, bee/flower, mind/body, life/death. Do these occur here? In
what combination?
Does the poem have an effective, striking, or climactic moment? Does it come to some kind of
resolution? What kind? What recognition does the speaker's persona achieve, or does the poem chronicle
simple description and observation?
Tone. What is the tone of the whole? Solemn? Playful? Irreverent? Mournful? Objective? What is
Dickinson trying to convey?
What Tradition Seems Invoked? In what ways does she allude to other works or poetic traditions?
(Metaphysical poetry, Philosophical, Meditations)? In what ways might this poem is an "answer" to
another author?
Rhetorical figures. Where does Dickinson use paradox? hyperbole? anaphora? apostrophe? litotes? Why
does she use them?
For additional reference see: Interesting Fun Facts About Emily Dickinson
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1958:
1974:
1987:
1998:
1996:
1998:
1998:
1998:
1999:
2001:
2001:
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CHRONOLOGY OF EMILY DICKINSON
1830
1840
1844
1847-48
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1855
1856
1857
1860
1861
1862
1864
1866
1870
1873
1874
1876
1878
1882
1883
1884
1886
1890
1891
1894
1896
2.
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WHO WAS EMILY DICKINSON INFLUENCED BY?
By and large, when scholars talk about who influenced Emily Dickinson, they
look at the books she had in her own library , and the writers she referred to in
her Letters (which was rare), extant journal & diary accounts of those who
knew her to whom she mentioned authors she enjoyed reading, and to
elliptical references or discernable stylistic parallels in her own writing.
Given Dickinsons originality and genius, the list is fairly short.
British Writers
American Writers
Anne Bradstreet
George Herbert
John Donne
Shakespeare
Edward Taylor
Jonathan Edwards
Ralph Waldo Emerson &
Transcendentalism
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
William Ellery Channing
Ike Marvell
Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 Vols. New
Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1960.
Lowenburg, Carlton, Emily Dickinsons Textbooks. Lafayetter, California, 1986.
Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1980
Wolf, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New York, AddisonWesley Publishing Company, Inc. , 1980.
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GARY LEE STONUM: from The Emily Dickinson Handbook @1998
Dickinson's Literary Background
At the center of any serious investigation of Emily Dickinson's poetry, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has noted, is
the problem of context. Not only do we know relatively little about the intentions, inspirations, and
constraints shaping Dickinson's literary career, but the poems regularly challenge us to imagine
backgrounds they conspicuously fail to specify. Poem after poem seems to avoid some "circumstance too
well known to be repeated to the initiate," so we the uninitiated keep trying to invent or reconstruct contexts
that will remedy the omission (Leyda I: xxi).
The question of context most often gets raised biographically, in the hope that recovering the private
circumstances of the poet's life will anchor the poetry in referentiality. Context is a cultural and historical
problem as well, for like any body of writing Dickinson's emerges from a network of symbolic practices and
takes many of its possibilities of meaning from this array. The hope here is that if only we could properly
identify and describe the cultural milieu we could more securely understand the poetry and better
appreciate Dickinson's achievement. Unfortunately, biographical criticism has more often amplified
disagreements about Dickinson's writing than dissipated them, and research into the cultural contexts of her
work has likewise reproduced rather than resolved disputes about how best to read it. At its best, rather
than answering interpretive questions, historical study typically reconfigures the stage on which they get
posed.
CHALLENGES
The biographical critic's diffculties stem in part from a lack of documentation: Lavinia Dickinson burned
Emily's papers after her sister died; only a small portion of the poet's apparently voluminous
correspondence has survived anf been located; and we have relatively little testimony from those who knew
her, especially by contrast to writers of the time who led more public lives. The difficulties of specifically
cultural contextualization begin with the same lack. We would certainly like to glean more information
about the literary roles Dickinson imagined for herself, about the books she and her circle of friends
admired or scorned, and about the references, allusions, and sayings they might have taken as starting
points. Actually we do know more about these matters than about, say, the poet's erotic life. The further
diffculty stems from her poetry's careful singularity, which both coaxes and frustrates a search for
explanatory contexts.
The same singularity defines the boundaries of our search. Consider Dickinson's insistence on uniqueness in
an I862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Apparently fearful he would suspect her of plagiarism, she
wrote that "I marked a line in One Versebecause I met it after I made itand never consciously touch a
paint, mixed by another personI do not let go it, because it is mine" (L27I). The remark indicates a
determination to avoid all literary indebtedness, especially stylistic, and it thus specifically disavows one
familiar kind of context.
True to her word, with the exception of a few openly allusive poems, Dickinson does successfully conceal
whatever immediate textual sources and inspirations her poetry might have. Her "Lay this Laurel on the
One" (PI 393), a four-line redaction of the seven stanzas composing Higginson's "Decoration," would be
unrecognizable as such if we did not know from their letters that his elegy was a source. We would be
equally in the dark about the quatrain's origin in Dickinson's grief over her father's death, which had
happened three years before. How many other poems arise from comparable but now unrecoverable
contexts? We do not know and for the most part can only mark our ignorance as one boundary of the
determinable backgrounds for her work. Dickinson's I862 letter also implicitly indicates the other boundary,
namely, the broad literary values and ideals shaping her work. By claiming the marked line as inalienable
property and in assuming that originality is requisite, Dickinson pledges allegiance to a pair of
romanticism's central tenets (Woodmansee 3555). That is, at the very moment Dickinson insists upon the
singularity of her poetry and hence its distance from all contexts, she allies herself to an established,
historically specific definition of poetry as the creation of singular genius. On the other hand, romanticism
can be such a broad concept, not to mention a disputed one, as to be of limited use in establishing a context
for Dickinson's writing. Even the insistence upon originality presupposes a historicism otherwise strikingly
absent from her writing.
Books and reading were Dickinson's primary access to a world beyond Amherst. We can thus at least be
reasonably confident that the cultural contexts of Dickinson's writing are primarily literary, particularly if
that term is defined inclusively. Her surviving letters are filled with references to favorite authors, and some
of the poems allude in one way or another to recognizable elements of her reading (Pollak, "Allusions"). To
be sure, she is by no means a learned poet in the vein of Milton or Pope, writers who can hardly be
appreciated without understanding their allusions and allegiances. Yet she is also surely not the unlettered
author Richard Chase once unguardedly deemed her, uninfluenced by literary sources in either style or
thought.
A few cautions need to be kept in mind as we examine various claims about Dickinson's literary milieu.
First, we know very little about how or even whether Dickinson imagined her work as participating in any
public enterprise. By contrast to a Keats, who dreamed of being among the English poets afters death, or a
James Joyce, who schemed tirelessly to shape his own reputation, Dickinson hardly trafficked in any
cultural arena. We do possess information about the books she read or admired, and we know from the
persistent testimony of her letters and poems that she regarded poetry as an exalted calling. Yet, although
we can reasonably infer from this a certain broad ambition, we simply do not know if Dickinson regarded
her vocation as entailing some sense of a role in literary history or as obliging her to bargain in the cultural
marketplace. We do not, for example, know whether or in what respect she regarded herself as a woman
poet, in spite of a number of lively arguments supposing that she did.
~
Indeed, because Dickenson showed so little interest in the cultural position her work might occupy, even
the most credible claims about her filiations usually testify as much to the critic's context as to the poet's.
Forty years ago, for example, when New Criticism held the fort and T.S. Eliot's praise of the metaphysical
poets heavily influenced Anglo-American literary taste, scholars regularly identifiied Donne, Herbert, and
Vaughan as her important predecessors. By 1980, however, the ascendancy of poststructuralist theory in the
United States had brought with it a keener appreciation of the major English romatics, and for a brief time
Wordsworth and Keats were regarded as exemplars of the tradition from which Dickinson sprang. More
recently and resoundingly, as feminist theory has called attention to a distinctively women's literature,
critics have looked to nineteenth-century American and English women writers as Dickinson's sources and
inspirations.
1. Evidence can be found to support all these claims. Two stanzas copied from George Herbert's "Matins"
were found among Dickinson's papers and even mistaken for a time as her own composition (Bingham,
Home 571-73). Likewise, Dickinson's letters make it clear that she eagerly followed the careers of several
female contemporaries, particularly Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet
evidence that Dickinson had some familiarity with another writer's work should not be confused with
confimation that the work is a significant context for her own. Indeed, we should probably distinguish two
sorts of context, the writerly and the readerly. To reconstruct a writerly or compositional context would be
to delineate the origins of particular texts and the circumstances in which they were written. As with "Lay
this Laurel on the One," historical evidence is crucial to such a task. To construct a readerly or interpretive
context, on the other hand, would be to set the work in telling relation to literary or cultural tradition.
Historical evidence can be suggestive, but it is rarely conclusive or even obligatory. A similarity to Christina
Rossetti, say, can thus be mildly illuminating, even though Dickinson seems to have had no acquaintance
whatsoever with the English poet (Leder and Abbott).
At the writerly end of the spectrum lie the sources Dickinson drew upon or referred to as she wrote, which
are of varying importance. Dickinson's regard for Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes it likely that her
"Vision of Poets" is a source of "I died for Beauty" (P449), as well as or even rather than Keats's now more
famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn." On the other hand, the identification is by no means crucial to an
understanding of the poem.
2. The more interesting cases are those in which the source is disputed and identification would make some
difference to our reading. Dickinson was notably fond of exotic place-names, most of which she must have
come upon in her reading and some of which may carry thematic associations. The reference to
"Chimborazo" in "Lovethou are high" (P4s3) may well derive incidentally from Edward Hitchcock's
Elemental Geology, where it stands among a list of the world's tallest mountains, or it may originate from
similarly casual uses in Barrett Browning and Emerson. On the other hand, if we heed Judith Farr's
investigations into the influence of contemporary painting, then we might recall that Frederic Church's
mammoth painting of Chimborazo was one of the most celebrated luminist canvases of the day
("Disclosing" 73-74). If the poem is read in the latter context, then the "Love" addressed by the poem as like
the mountain would function more insistently as a figure of sublime theopllany. (The poem also clearly
alludes to Exodus 33, the chief biblical commonplace for such an event.)
3. Likewise, two equally recherche possibilities have been identified for the source of "The Malay took the
Pearl" (P4s2), each linking the poem to different parts of Dickinson's work. Theodora Ward proposes Robert
Browning's Pnracelsus and along with Jack Capps associates the poem with others using the image of
diving for pearls (Ward 6I-63; Capps, Readi1lg 8g-go). Farr nominates De Quincey's Confessionals of
English Opiu7~2 Ente1; which would corroborate her reading of the poem as representing Emily's rivalry
with Austin over the affections of Susan (Passiol7 I48). Farr's case is helped by our knowledge that
Dickinson tried to obtain a copy of Confessionals in 1858 and that the book may be found in the family
library (Capps 8 I -8~).
In addition to supporting this or that interpretation of a poem, writerly contexts can themselves become a
starting point for interpretation. According to Martha Dickenson Bianchi, three portraits hung in her Aunt
Emily's room (Life 83).Two are of writers we know from other sources that she admired greatly: Elizabeth
Barrett Browning and George Eliot.
4. That the other is Thomas Carlyle, whom she never mentions, may suggest that he, too, helped shape her
literary imagination. On the relatively slender basis of this clue, my own work has stressed an affinity
between Carlyle's Heroes and Hero worship and Dickinson's "This was a Poet" (P448). The claim is highly
speculative, and its validity no doubt depends less on the historical evidence (itself from a somewhat
unreliable source) than on the explanatory power gained from linking Dickinson and Carlyle.
5. On the other end of the spectrum are readerly or interpretive contexts, which must be judged entirely on
explanatory power. Consider as an extreme example George Whicher's otherwise admirable biography from
1938. Whicher is one of the few early critics to notice Dickinson's comic writing, which he links to the
raucous, largely populist strand of American humor challenged in the thirties by Constance Roarke. We
may smile today at the thought of placing Dickinson next to her contemporary Mark Twain (both clad in
white, of course), but the very unlikeliness calls attention to the grossness of comparison. The association
does serve an interest, even an ideological program. Seeing Dickinson as a Yankee humorist distances her
poetry from the conservatice and patrician social milieu in which she lived her entire life, and it gives her a
place of some pride in the Popular Front vision of American literary history. Yet unbuttoned humor seems
alien to the preponderately psychological and metaphysical orientation of many Dickinson poems, so
Whicher's argument ultimately calls more attention to differences than to resemblences.
Although Whicher has not persuaded many readers, his proposal is also neither illigetemate nor different in
kind from more winning claims. It is an act of assimilitating, and the test of such acts is whether they help
us understand and evaluate the appropriated material. As Dickinson herself affirms, we see comparatively,
antl the very visibility of Dickinson's work partly depends upon our seeing it in comparison to some
context. Moreover, such comparisons are also always a form of judgment. Whicher clearly values the
thought that Dickenson's poetry participates in the progressive social and intellectual format of her day, and
his commentary singles out for attention and admiration those aspects of her work that do so participate.
6. Our information about Emily Dickinson's reading comes from a finite body of documents, and most of it
can now be found convenietly in a handful of collections and studies. The vast majority of the references in
her own poetry are helpfully annotated and indexed in Thomas Johnson's I955 edition of the Poems.
Although Johnson's edition has come under criticism for its typographic representation of her manuscripts
and for its confident separation of poems from correspondence, these complaints do not apply to his
identification of the names, places, tags, and quotations in her verse. The letters are a richer source of
information about Dickinson's reading, and here too Johnson's edition is essential, although not as fully
annotated as the Poems. Of the handful of documents by and about Dickinson that have turned up in
subsequent years, the most important for conveying a sense of her cultural milieu are the Lyman Letters,
which Richard Sewall has edited.
7. Many of the references in Dickinson's writings are discussed in Jack Capps's indispensable Emily
Dickinson's Reading, which includes a detailed index of the books and authors she mentions in poems or
letters. Capps also surveys the contents of the family library, much of which is now at Harvard.
Unfortunately, the usefulness of the library "is limited by the fact that books from the Austin Dickinson and
Edward Dickinson household have been mixed and, in most cases, dates of acquisition and individual
ownership are uncertain" (8). Likewise, although these volumes include inscriptions, marginalia, and other
evidence of use, few of the markings can be confidently traced to the poet herself.
Capps describes a number of suggestive facts about the library, noting for example that of a three-volume
Works of Thomas Browne belonging to Susan the only cut pages are those containing "Religio Medici" and
"Christian Morals." This casts doubt on Emily's avowal to Higginson that Browne was one of her favorites.
In one of her earliest letters to hitn she had written that "For PoetsI have Keatsand Mr and Mrs
Browning. For ProseMr Ruskin Sir Thomas Browneand the Revelations" (L271). The account may be
more polite than accurate. Several of the writers she names were singled out for praise in Higginson's
Atlantic Monthly essay, "Letter to a Young Contributor," the occasion of her writing to him in the first
place.
Capps's account of the Dickinson library is not meant to be exhaustive, but one can find various additional
remarks about marked passages and well-thumbed pages in the writings of others who have used the
Harvard archive. In addition to Capps, the richest accounts are Sewall's biography and the books written by
Ruth Miller and Judith Farr.
A brief but tantalizing account of the periodical literature Dickinson read is available from Joan Kirkby. In "Dickinson Reading,"
Springfield Republican and the Hampshire and Franklin Express.
Capps also briefly lists the textbooks in use at Mount Holyoke during Dickinson's time there. The list is substantially amplified
by the Carlton Lowenberg's Emily Dickinson's Textbooks, which interprets its subject broadly, including hymnals and
devotional writings in the family library as well as the authors and texts Emily may have encountered at Amberst Academy
and Mount Holyolke Seminary. Lowenberg also describes the markings in books belonging to the Dickinsons, including those
in a number of volumes not retained in the Harvard Collection.
8. The other most important record of primary sources is Jay Leyda's remarkable Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, which
excerpts in chronological order and impressive array of letters and diaries of the Dickinsons, newspapers and magazines
available to the family, and various public and private writings by those in and around their world. In some respects his book
is a more useful introduction to the poet's life than either of the two best biographies. Whereas Sewall and Wolff both properly
give organized interpretations of her world, Leyda offers something more like raw materials.
9. A number of anecdotes and recollections have been preserved by Dickinson's family, friends, and early editors. Such reports,
which may be found scattered throughout the works of Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bignham, need to be
used with some care. However, no one has actually challenged Bianchi's account of the three portraits or questioned Susan's
attribution to Emily of this remark about Emerson: "It was as if he had come from where dreams are born'' (Leyda 2: 35 1 -52).
Of special although uncertain significance for Dickinson's literary milieu is an essay by Bianchi, which provides our only listing
of books said to have been kept on the mantel of Emily's room: Ranthorpe, The Mill on the Floss, The Imitaion of Christ,
Abelard and Heloise, The Life of Jean Paul, and The Last Days of Bryon and Shelly. Bianchi's essay included as an appendix to
Barton Levi St. Armand's Emily Dickinson and Her Culture.
10. One additional source deserves special mention. Dickinson seems to have made frequent and extensive use of Noah
Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language in writing her poems, harkening not only to definitions but to
etymologies (sometitnes dubious ones) and illustrative quotations. It therefore matters considerably which of the considerably
different versions she consulted. The scholarly consensus is for (an 1844 reprint of) the 1841 edition, rather than the 1828 edition
(also in the Dickinson library), and for any of the ones dated 1847 or later (Buckingham). Although reprinted several times, the
1841 edition is relatively rare. Students of Dickinson are thus likely to welcome the annotated reconstriction of her lexicon
being prepared under the direction of Cynthia Hallen.
CONTEXTS
11. The extant claims about Dickinson's readerly and writerly filiations divide roughly but conveniently into three areas:
Jacobean literature, including Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and some of the metaphysical poets; New England culture
from the Puritans up through such contetllporaries as Emerson; and nineteenth-century English literature from Wordsworth to
the Brownings. Overlapping the last two but also possibly a distinct category for Dickinson were the English and American
women who were Dickinson's immediate predecessors and peers. Dickinson herself might not have recognized any of the
categories, we should keep in mind. Unlike most other writers of the time, Dickinson did not hold a historicist view of
literature, or at least left no record of doing so.
11. Jack Capps has proposed that Dickinson showed little interest in literature not written in English and also that she did not
pay much attention even to English literature prior to Shakespeare. The observation needs some qualification. Dickinson
studied both French and Latin in school, and as Vivian Pollak notes, classical mythology contributes the second-largest group
of fictive characters mentioned in her writings. Likewise, George Monteiro has argued for the influence of the sixteenth-century
Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoes, whom Dickinson would have encountered from reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In
addition, it is possible that Dickinson shared somewhat in the romantic medievalism of her day and so may have cared more
about earlier literature than Capps suspects. Farr and St. Armand both make cases for an afffinity with Pre-Raphaelitistn, for
example.
Nevertheless, Capps's view largely holds. The Greek and Latin references are almost all proverbial, and Dickinson was surely
far less interested in foreign or historically remote cultures than most of her peers. One further omission is notable. Although
morally respectable authors from the Restoration and afterward were staples of her school curriculum, Dickinson makes
conspicuously few references to Milton, Cowper, Pope, Johnson, Young, Thomson, or Goldsmith (R. Sewall, Life 349-53). The
only eighteenth-century writer arguably to have influenced her is Isaac Watts, whose hymns have often been seen as the main
source of her prosody. However, besides a fondness for odd rhymes and numerous examples of common meter and its kin,
Watts seems at most to have contributed an occasional point of rhetorical departure or a target for parody. For a recent,
measured view on this subject, consult Judy Jo Small's Positive as Sound, which qualifies the influential claitus of Martha
Winburn England.
12. The difference between readerly and writerly looms largest in discussions of Dickinson's seventeenth-century predecessors.
A prime example of readerly claims, the once commonplace link with the metaphysicals, is based chiefly on similarities of style
and subject. Following the lead of numerous earlier reviewers and critics, Judith Farr (writing then as Judith Banzer) has
concluded that Dickinson resembles Donne, Herbert, and their successors in favoring abrupt or startling opening lines,
epigrammatic forms, and unusually concise or elliptical expressions. Her "Before I got my eye put out" can thus be compared
with Herbert's "I struck the board, and cried, No more," and her "To disappear enhances'' with Donne's frequently paradoxical
and riddling conceits. The resemblance appears the stronger when Dickinson is set against her contemporaries, and indeed the
similarity is often emphasized as a way of advocating the superiority of Dickinson's style to Victorian lushness and fluency.
The intense and highly personal religious concerns in much of Dickinson's poetry have also been seen as a link to the
seventeenth century, regarded as the font of English devotional and meditative verse (Martz). In this, however, she differs less
from her American contemporaries, especially the Victorian writers of England and America most likely to be scorned by
advocates of the seventeenth century. One issue in the relative importance of these two contexts is the stress on intellectual and
pointedly antisentimental meditations; to like a look of agony or to declare that the admirations and contempts of time show
justest through an open tomb is thus arguably to exhibit a metaphysical
sensibility. On the other hand, much of Dickinson's
religious verse resembles
the sentimental consolation verse of her day in emphasizing the pathos of death and the pain of
separation from loved ones.
Although Dickinson clearly had some acquaintance with Herbert and Vaughan and probably also knew a bit about Donne and
others, the evidence suggests that her awareness would have come too late and been too casual to have actively influenced her
own art. Such at least is the conclusion of Ruth Miller, based on examining dates and markings in the Dickinson family library
and investigating references to seventeenth-century poetry in the newspapers and periodicals read by Emily. Most of the
sources date from the 1860s, by which time her mature style was fully formed and her characteristic themes and attitudes well
established.
13. By contrast, the evidence is considerable for the writerly impact of the King Jamess Bible and of Shakespeare on Dickinson's
writing. The Bible is by far the text most frequently quoted or referred to in her poetry, albeit not quite as a literary source.
(Fordyce Bennett's Reference Guide provides poem-by poem list of scriptural echoes and allusions.)
The Bible is also the main source for what Ruth Miller calls Dickinson's reply poems, texts staged as a rejoinder to some other
text. Sewall cites the following example in his biography:
"And with what body do they come?"
Then they do comeRejoice
What DoorWhat HourRunrunMy Soul
Illuminate the House!
"Body!" Then reala Face and Eyes
To know that it is them!
Paul knew the Man that knew the News
He passed through Bethlehem(Pl492)
Like most reply poems, this one quotes the source text conspicuously. Oddly, but also typical of her reply poems in this respect,
this poem is known to us only for having been sent in a letter; it is not to be found among the fascicles. In quite different ways,
both features suggest Dickinson's care that her reader recognize the staging. She both supplies the reference and addresses the
poem to a known audience, upon whose understanding she can presumably rely.
Although only a handful of poems can unmistakably be identified as replies, others may also originate more covertly as
responses to a particular source. Noting the playful allusiveness in much of Dickinson's correspondence, for example, Richard
Sewall has suggested that parts of a favorite text and even single words regularly served as a stimulus to her imagination. His
suggestion exemplifies the frequent suspicion that many of Dickinson's poems stem from sources we are unable to identify,
sources as likely to be textual as biographical and possibly to be both at once.
14. Like reply poems, the many references in Dickinson's letters to Dickens, George Eliot, and most of all Shakespeare
presuppose a shared and often also what is obviously a mutually cherished context. Early on they seem a badge of group
identity. The regular recourse to Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor in letters to girlhood friends suggests, for example,
that Ik Marvel (Mitchell's pen name) served her circle as a source of erotic and probably also parentally disreputable pleasures
of the imagination. Well beyond adolescence, in addition, literary references proliferate in letters to many of Dickinson's
correspondents, and they also have been taken as signs of a special relation to her audience.
The most fully argued case concerns the Shakespearean tags and allusions that proliferate in letters between the poet and her
sister-in-law and also in the poems that Emily sent to Susan. In line with similar observations by Rebecca Patterson and Paula
Bemlett, Judith Farr has proposed that references to the plays, particularly Antony and Cleopatra, served Emily and Susan as a
code language (Patterson, Imagery; Bennett, "Orient"). The single word "Egypt," as in Antony's "Egypt, thou knew'st too well,"
could thus invoke the entire passion of the play's principals, and it could call up an identification of Emily as Antony and Susan
as Cleopatra.
Shakespeare is not the only candidate for such a private lexicon. Farr makes a similar claim about Jane Eyre
as a source for the Master letters and as a code used in writing to Samuel Bowles (whom Farr identifies as
the addressee of the Master letters). Likewise, St. Armand proposes;11 "Veiled Ladies" that Bettina von
Arnim's Die Gunderode (in Margaret Fuller's I842 translation) played a comparable role in correspondence
with Susan and that Dickens and Shakespeare both served that function in letters to Bowles and later to
Judge Lord.
Another aspect of the Shakespearean references, second in number only to the Bible but confined mainly to
letters, points to a different kind of literary model. Dickinson never refers to the sonnets, though in their
Iyric and seemingly confessional mode and their frequent recourse to a shadowy but coherent erotic
narative those poems might seem to resemble many of Dickinson's. Likewise, she refers sparingly to the
histories, comedies, and romances, although the last two genres might be thought to have the same kind of
appeal and also to attract Dickinson's attention by their wit and wordplay, activities at which Dickinson also
excels. Dickinson's evident bardolatry"While Shakespeare remains literature is firm" (L368)is of another
sort, however. She attends overwhelmingly to the tragedies, referring primarily to characters and dramatic
speeches rather than to theme or style. Dickinson may thus have admired Shakespeare most for what Keats
called his negative capability, the art coming from the embodiment of character more than sheer verbal skill
or a capacity to express the poet's own thoughts and feelings. When Dickinson protests to Higginson that it
is not she but a representative of the verse who speaks in the poems, we may suspect her of staking out
some privacy from what otherwise are revealingly personal poems. But Dickinson's admiration for
Shakespeare suggests the appeal of role playing and hence a fondness for representing characters other than
her own.
Whereas the seventeenth century is a context Dickinson would have had to search out or select, New
England is one she would have had difficulty avoiding, so the task for her readers and critics is to specify
which aspects are most important or illuminating. Except for a common and often unspoken assumption
that Dickenson is a quintessentially American writer, by which is usually meant a quintessentially New
Englalld writer, opinions differ about what her countrymen meant to her and which of them loomed the
largest. Earlier cultural histories stressed the importance of a Puritan intellectual and religious heritage but
were usually unable to locate particular influences. More recently critics have paid attention to the popular
literature of the times, especially by women. Dickinson knew this literature quite well, as her letters make
clear. In addition, from the beginning a debate has raged about the importance to Dickinson of Emerson and
Emersonianism.
14. Dickinson lived all her life in the Connecticut Valley, a stronghold of uncompromising Calvinism and
the site during her formative years of the last great religious revivals in New England. Although she
ultimately resisted conversion and although she showed no special interest in reading devotional texts, she
seems nevertheless to have been well schooled in the New England mind by the sermons she heard and by
the influence of family, friends, and teachers. Questions of faith get explored in Dickinson's poetry against a
background of three divergent sources: the older Puritanism lingering in conservative Amherst, the
liberalizing and rationalizing trends of Enlightenment thought that culminated in Emersonian
transcendentalism, and a sentimental or domestic religiosity that arose during Dickinson's own lifetime.
I find that the surest guide to the first two sources is Karl Keller, who offers separate, detailed comparisons
with Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Jonathon Edwards and a canny critique of the frequent emphasis
on Emerson's importance. Keller argues that as a whole Puritanism chiefly supplied to Dickinson a mythic
framework within which poetic and existential dramas could be staged. The most important plank in the
scaffolding is that value and meaning are to be discovered by scuutinizing the soul; real life is within. The
importance of introspection is, of course, a cliche about New England culture, in that it supposedly links
together everyone from Cotton Mather to Wallace Stevens. The cliche takes on considerable force in
Dickinson's writing, however, since she arguably privileges interiority to a greater and more exclusive
degree than any American poet. Moreover, her corresponding inattention to social and historical
externalities distinguishes her from another important line of American writing that also descends from
Puritanism. Unlike the New England writing that Sacvan Bercovitch has recently much emphasized,
Dickinson does not identify the soul's fate with a national destiny. She writes no jeremiads.
Instead, Dickinson couples introspection with a more specifically religious doctrine, namely, the ontological
gap between man and God and the absolute importance of this divide. In numerous poems the difference
between time and eternity or earth and heaven is precisely what makes a difference, that is, makes meaning
and makes the concerns of her poetry meaningful. According to Calvinism, one more feature of the same
scene is that God is above all the source of judgment, however much divinity may also be associated with
charity, grace, wisdom, and so forth. Dickinson, too, never abjures this possibility, although she also
entertains other opinions about divine justice and sovereignty.
Although she evinces a keen respect for human intellect, especially her own, Dickinson seems true to her
Connecticut Valley roots in resisting the confidence in human reason that gave rise to Unitarianism and
other liberalizing trends. However, many of her poems about nature take seriously the collateral
Emersonian belief that one can and should read the landscape for signs of transcendental truth. Not only are
there sermons in stones, but we are equipped to hear them, at least some of the time. As the Wordsworthian
tag indicates, Emerson is not the only source of this romantic tenet, but he was certainly the dominant voice
in the United States and he is clearly the father in this respect of the nature writings of Thoreau and
Higginson, which Dickenson seems to have read appreciatively.
In a great many Dickinson poems rehearsing a number of different views, the most urgent religious and
existential issues are reasonably well defined by the distance between Connecticut Valley dread and
Concord enthusiasm that Dickenson at least knew of the latter is undeniable. She was given a copy of
Emerson's Poems in 1853, and she writes approvingly of Representative Men. On the other hand, she
neglected meeting him in 1857 when he lectured in Amherst and then spent the night next door at Austin
and Susan's house. More strikingly, none of their several mutual literary acquaintances seemed to have
shown any of her poems to him.
Emerson and Dickinson both care a great deal about the soul's access to supernal power and to a
transcendent state of being, and she often joins him in demanding such a boon. On the other hand, for every
poem in which she imagines herself as a debauchee of dew, there is another in which she represents such
rapture as an earthly paradise that too competes with heaven. In other words, she regularly imagines rivalry
and conflicting motives in the soul's traffic with the divine, whereas Emerson is prone to emphasize
continuity and harmony.
The relation with Emerson and the Puritan past is one emphasized in American studies by what must now
be regarded as the old consensus. That school of thinking has been challenged in converging ways by
feminist critics and hy historical scholars such as St. Armand. Both newer approaches stress Dickinson's
immersonion in the popular culture of her time and her fondness for at least some of its once scorned
motifs. Next to the highbrow tradition running from Edwards to Emerson, for example, St. Armand
juxtaposes the literature of what he calls a Sentimental Love Religion, which is primarily a construct of the
women of Victorian America. He thus notes that a number of Dickenson's Iyrics presuppose as background
some version of the widely popular narratives in which "death, love, the afterlife, nature and art are all
bound in fealty to the great idea of romance" (Culture 80). Such narratives are both literally and
metaphorically operatic, serving commonly as the plots for actual libretti and finding a place in numerous
popular novels of the day.
Several aspects of this literature obviously resonate with a number of Dickinson's poems. One key motif is
that of separated, banned, or otherwise star-crossed lovers, who often can hope only for reunion after death.
Another is the centrality of deathbed scenes and of a sentimental rhetoric of consolation, which is especially
important to the verse of the time. It has long been obvious that many of Dickinson's poems both draw upon
such mortuary verse and also importantly depart from it. Now that such poetry is again being read with
some respect for its historical valences, it should become possible to sort out Dickinson's relation to this
work and compare the influence more judiciously to sterner Puritan notions about death and dying.
A third aspect of such literature stresses religion's material comforts, imagining heaven as a well-furnished
house in which the self can feel at home. This is the aspect that most diverges from Puritanism, with its
more disembodied theology and its emphasis on the perils of damnation over the promises of salvation. It is
also the most significantly gendered aspect, Puritanism representing a harsh, masculine tradition against the
feminized religion of the heart. Dickinson's relation to the materialist aspect of sentimentality remains a
subject open to investigation. A comparison between home and heaven is clearly crucial to Dickinson, but it
is less likely that she shares the Biedermeier sensibility of an Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, St. Armand's chief
exemplar of material domesticity.
Joining St. Armand in decrying the tendency to dwell too exclusively on highbrow culture are both David
Reynolds, who links Dickinson to the themes of the sensation fiction of the 184'5 and I850's, and a number of
feminist scholars who stress Dickinson's kinship with the once much-lamented women poets of the century.
The important claims here go beyond similarities of theme and imagery to the possibility that women's
poetry differed in kind and genre from nineteenth-century poetry by men. Cheryl Walker offers the richest
discussion so far of this claim, singling out such categories as verse fantasies of power, poems that on the
other side identify with powerlessness and abjection, and poems that imagine some sanctuary for the
sensitive or threatened soul. Above all, she notes, women's poetry stresses feeling and sensibility over
thought or fact, largely exemplifying in this respect the culture's separation between men's and women's
spheres.
15. American literature seems more a source of intellectual and thematic contexts for Dickinson than of
specifically literary inspirations and challenges. Dickinson's gnomic style suffficiently resembles Emerson's
that when published anonymously one of her poems was misidentified as his. Yet, except for one redaction
of William Ellery Channing (PIZ34), and early references to Bryant (PI3I) and Longfellow (P:84), Dickinson
does not invoke American authors in her verse. The case for the specifically literary influence of American
literature comes more from the models it may have provided for her imaginative and artistic life. Richard
Sewall, for example, explores in some detail the possible influence on Dickinson's imagination of
Longfellow's Kavanagh and Mitchell's Reveries.
16. Pursuing a similar topic in a different fashion, Joanne Dobson examines how Dickinson's ardent but
invisible literary identity figures against both the careers of other women writers of the time and the models
of female selfhood available in their writing. Partly stressing the code of reticence to which women were
expected to adhere, Dobson also makes it clear that many women either transgressed it or found ways to
mitigate it. The result is to modify the picture of Dickinson as rebel and nonconformist that is usually
derived from her obvious stylistic and intellectual daring. Dobson portrays Dickinson, in her reluctance
about publication and publicity, as largely acquiescing to an orthodoxy against which others often
strugglcd.
17. In New England Literary Culture Lawrence Buell also portrays Dickinson's literary identity as more
conventional than others have seen. He first acknowledges her stylistic and rhetorical obliqueness, then
notes that it can and has been equally well explained as resulting from two different forms of ambivalence
on her part, one about Puritan theology and the other about the ideology of true womanhood in Victorian
America. In either case the result is that Dickinson is torn between private passion and established morality,
and in this she is said importantly to resemble Longfellow, Lowell, and other middlebrow poets of her
region. Buell accordingly portrays her as an especially telling representative of New England culture rather
than an idiosyncratic exception to its main patterns.
One drawback of Buell's argument is that it would apply equally well to most English writers of the time,
and indeed he acknowledges at one point that a regional focus risks blinding the critic to larger patterns.
More generally, the silently nationalist bias of much Dickinson criticism may similarly limit the visibility of
larger contexts. Dickinson herself was no respecter of frontiers. Perhaps conspicuously, she never echoes
one of the resouncling commonplaces of antebellum culture, namely, the importance of establishing a
distinctively American literature. Although recent scholarship has stressed the forgotten American writers,
particularly women, whom Dickinson would have learned from, thereby correcting an undue stress on
Emerson, Whitman, and other male standards, Dickinson herself expressed the greatest enthusiasn for
English writers, many of them female contemporaries, and seemed otherwise wholly indifferent to the
cultural nationalism prevalent in her day.
More specifically, she admired the writers of her day (the Brownings, the Brontes) who most clearly carried
forward the idealistic program of English romanticism. I have elsewhere argued that Dickinson felt an
allegiance to the poetry of sensation, which begins with Keats and Shelley and continues with such
"spasmodics" as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the early Tennyson. This is a school contrasted in Victorian
England with the poetry of reflection, deriving from Wordsworth and perhaps finding its culmination in
Arnold's criticism. More generally, Sewall observes that at a fundamental level "her sense of self had
Romantic origins, rebellious at first, developing into a kind of heroic individualism," and that she had a
"Romantic sensitivity to Nature" (Life 7I4).
On the other hand, she makes few references to the major romantic poets, and the one full-scale study of her
relation to English romanticism, Joanne Feit Dichl's, is obliged to posit rather than demonstrate the
connection. Indeed, Diehl's work depends upon the notably ahistorical and context-indifferent poetics
developed by Harold Bloom. It is, in other words, another readerly appropriation, in which the detailed
comparison of "Frost at Midnight" and "The Frost was never seen" depends for its value on mutually
illuminating the two poems and not on the hunch that Dickinson's poem is a reply to Coleridge's.
Furthermore, in her own references to nineteenth-century English literature Dickinson more often expressed
enthusiasm about novels and novelists than about poetry, the more so if we regard Browning's Aurora
Leigh as essentially a novel in verse. Dickinson refers usually to the characters rather than to phrasings,
plot, settings, and so on. Gilbert and Gubar accordingly argue that these characters offer broad models for
the personae in her poems. Moreover, Dickinson's references to the characters are of a piece with her
abundant interest in the writerst biographies. As Margaret Homans observes, Dickinson seems to have
grouped both real and fictional characters under the category of "exemplary lives" (Women Writers 164).
The pattern may thus further confirm Dickinson's greater interest in imagining character than in expressing
the self. On the other hand, exemplary lives may chiefly be models for oneself; Homans's point is that
Dickinson looked especially to other women writers for examples of literary identity.
18. Except for one telling phrase commemorating Elizabeth Barrett Browning (P312) and another that
praises Helen Hunt Jackson, perhaps dutifully and politely (L368), Dickinson does not actually single out
women writers as a category, nor does she ever explicitly identify her own situation as that of a woman
writer. On the other hand, the issue of female authorship was so widely debated in her day that Dickinson
could hardly have been unaware of it. Moreover, even if the issue plays an uncertain role as a compositional
context, it emphatically dominates recent interpretive contexts. Much contemporary criticism reads
Dickinson symptomatically, as inevitably expressing the situation of the woman writer although not
necessarily thematizing it.
In addition to the otherwise separable contexts that can briefly be designated as poetry by American women
and novels by English women, two cases can be made for gender as a context that crosses borders and
genres. Paula Bennet makes the most forceful claim for the first: "Dickinson's definition of herself as woman
poet was . . . rooted in her positive feelings for women. If, with the exception of Jackson, Dickinson never
mentions American women poets by name, she nevertheless saw herself as part of a female literary tradition
which she and they shared. British in origin, this tradition had found its richest, most complicated,
expression in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot" (Woman Poet
I4I5). According to this view the American divide between a sentimental religion of the heart and a Puritan
religion of the head is for Dickinson chiefly a dispute between gynocentric and androcentric notions of
selfhood. As such, it links up with the social and erotic issues faced by such as Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre.
The other case, which I find more suggestive, depends on contemporary theories about the gendering of
language and meaning. According to such a perspective, which is best represented by the work of Diehl,
Homans, and Loeffelholtz, Dickinson draws her "unique power from her particular way of understanding
her femininity" (Homans, Women Writers I7I). However, both this argument and the more specific one that
she adheres to a nonreferential language, one which she and her culture would have regarded as female,
stand at some distance from historically verifiable claims about Dickinson's sources and background.
USEFUL WEBSITES:
1. Emily Dickinson:
Scholarly sources
seen little difference: when Helen Hunt Jackson (one of Dickinson's girlhood
friends and lifelong correspondent) anonymously published Dickinson's
"Success" the poem was attributed to Emerson.
A. Like the Transcendentalists, Dickinson sought a transcendent knowledge
and rejected system and argument in favor of intuition. But while
Transcendentalism addressed an impersonal higher reality, Dickinson, rooted
in latter-day Puritanism, addressed a personal God directly and questioned his
authority.
B. Moreover, her Nature is more treacherous and unpredictable, providing
only transitory moments of ecstasy or insight. Although the natural world may
sometimes convey a feeling of safety, this will be followed by hostility.
C. While the Transcendentalists believed that they could read and understand
the symbolic significance of nature, it was thoroughly ambivalent for
Dickinson. She could not share the movement's moral idealism: while the
Transcendental writers found a justification for evil, Dickinson took agony to
be the price paid for each moment of ecstasy.
D. Some of Dickinson's nature poems restate Transcendentalists attitudes
about the mystical bond between man and nature and nature's ability to reveal
to man truths about humankind and the universe. But this is a small part of
her poetry.
E. Most of her work is not in the Transcendental mood: some poems affirm an
unbreachable separation between man and nature; others merely show delight
in the variety and spectacle of nature. She substituted passing insights and
ambivalence for the Transcendentalists' orphic vision and assurances.
F. Both Emerson and Dickinson were rebellious, creative, and primarily
concerned with humanity's relation to God and nature, regarding natural signs
as symbols of what lay beyond them. However, Dickinson did not share
Emerson's optimism. While he spoke of "nature," she spoke of a
gothic"landscape"; and while for Emerson the interpretation of natural signs
brings the perceiver closer to the benevolent Oversoul, to Dickinson it
revealed the presence of an awe-inspiring God. Where one recognized the
moral justification of everything, the other experienced painful doubt. For
both writers, however, the soul was consciousness and had to catch the ecstasy
of the irrecoverable moment. W
G. While Emerson's poetic circles reached outward, Dickinson's mostly
plunged inward. Since Emerson believed in man's capacity to deduce meaning
from signs, his language clarifies and liberates, while Dickinson's reveals the
ambiguity of signs and the predicament of the preceiver.
______________________________________________________________
DICKINSON AND PROPHECY IN THE TRANSCENDENTALIST
TRADITION:
Understood as a truth-telling and visionary mode, prophecy in the antebellum
(pre-Civil War) years deeply interested New Englanders, including Emily
Dickinson.
Dickinson and her contemporaries encountered it both as oratory and as
literature, most notably by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and
Walt Whitman, but also by preachers, political speakers, and others. The
imminence of the Civil War encouraged a rhetoric of apocalypse as orators
often questioned the purity of the nation and spoke of war as God's judgment.
Surrounded by a host of orators and self-proclaimed prophets, Dickinson
responded with a wisdom literature of her own making. She drew on the
prophetic tradition she knew best, the Judeo-Christian one, to claim both
religious and poetic authority.
A. Prophecy forms the center of Transcendentalist poetics. According to Emerson, the poet's
office consists of articulating the spiritual facts of earthly existence, with the
effect of emancipating humanity through the poet's sublime vision.
But the Romantic idea of the poet as prophet derives from classical and
biblical models. Prophecy forms the largest body of writings in the
Bible--those of the Old Testament prophets as well as John's Book of
Revelation in the New Testamentand also forms the largest body of poetry
in the Scriptures. Along with the wisdom literature of the Bible (e.g., the Book
of Proverbs), these writings may be the most significant single rhetorical
influence on Dickinson's art. Indeed, the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition
more broadly defined as including Scripture as well as the evangelical
preaching of Dickinson's day (which extended the scriptural prophetic
tradition into contemporary times) profoundly informed Dickinson's art, even
as she drew on it to challenge aspects of evangelical dogma.
B. The notion of prophecy thus links many of Dickinson's contexts
historical, literary, rhetorical, religiou~and, in fact, clarifies how Dickinson
probably saw her own art. We hear her prophetic voice particularly in the
proverbial statements that usually open her poems. But her poetry of prophecy
goes beyond that to express the stance, style, structures, and themes of
Judeo-Christian prophets.
C. Understanding Dickinson's poetry as prophecy explains her choice of
"slantness"* or indirection as a poetic technique, as she, like the scriptural
prophets, positioned herself on the margins of her community yet directed her
words to it. Like Isaiah and Christ before her, she spoke to "those who have
ears to hear" and seemed to write her poetry out of an inner compulsion to
speak truth.
D. Prophecy as poetry also helps to explain the spoken quality of Dickinson's
verse and Dickinson's choice of song for her poetry: the most notable female
prophet of the Bible, Miriam, is known for having sung her prophecy rather
than offered a jeremiad.
The struggle to find and manipulate a rhetorical form through which to
express a religious vision links Dickinson to other American women
"prophets" who were disallowed the public platform because of cultural
constraints against women's public prophetic speech: Anne Hutchinson,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Grimke, and possibly the myriad female
devotional poets of Dickinson's day. Indeed, in that time, a number of
influential women spoke to women's special predilection to prophesynot
only Margaret Fuller but also the conservatively religious Lydia Maria Child
and Sarah Josepha Hale. In the context of female oratory, male preaching,
romantic poetry, and the Scnptures, Dickinson crafted her own understanding
of the female seer who condemns superficiality and hypocrisy but also
consoles, sings, and wonders, adjusting the terms to faith to a new vision of
spirituality.
SOME SELECTED POEMS: (Poems are untitled, referred to by their first lines,
and dated [by Johnson] according to development of Dickinson's
handwriting):
1. # 185
____________________________________________
To the Meridian
To pack the Bud oppose the Worm
Obtain its right of Dew
Adjust the Heat elude the Wind
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility --
Second Place:
Third Place:
In the 19th C. there are numerous puns about poesies and poems and
Dickinson herself often equated the two. Farr states:
An understanding of the importance to [Dickinson] of
flowers in general and specific flowers in particular enriches the
understanding of Emily Dickinsons life and art. She herself defined
her flowers and her poems as related gifts of the Muse [see Dorothy
Huff Oberhaus Emily Dickinsons Fascicles: Method and Meaning, U
Park. PA, Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1995, p. 180 she regards
flower as a trope for the word poem, declaring that in some
instances the poet blurs the distinction between both herself and her
poems, and herself and her flowers.]
80 poems mention roses [about 6-8 of these use the word rose as a verb]
20 mention clover
2 mention hyacinth, 5 lilacs, 8 lillies, 12 buds,
Other: 196 mention birds, 86 bees, 48 butterflies, 8 snakes
Franklin # 380
Franklin # 1610
What heart would risk the way making them her Crimson Scouts
sent ahead, which are safer than actually hazarding ones own person to
suffer intense feeling directly. Dickinson even employs synecdoche, artfully
substituting parts of the rose for parts of letters or even speech (in # 334) :
Syllables of Velvet / Sentences of Plush, / Depths of Ruby, which the
speaker sees as more fair than All the letters I can write because they are
undrained. And only once does Dickinson seem to directly compare
herself to a rose after direct contact with nature ( # 19 ) : And Im a Rose.
Even though, as Farr asserts, the daisy, anemone, violet, gentian, and other
woodland flowers interest [Dickinson] more her perception of the rose,
especially its scent, is something to be experienced Abstemiously
(Franklin 806) because it is the sum of all scents, the very essence of
beauty. (Farr 190). Because of its natural allure as well as its hidden
danger, the rose was a flower to be respected in Dickinsons poetic
language.
Violets: # 14, 32, 90, 469, 611, 641, 722, 830 (Johnson).
# 469 ( about 1862, Johnson) Franklin # 603
The Red Blaze is the Morning
The Violet is Noon
The Yellow Day is falling
And after that is non
But Miles of Sparks at Evening
Reveal the Width that burned
The Territory Argent that
Never yet consumed
# 611 (about 1862, Johnson), Franklin # 442
I see thee better in the Dark
I do not need a Light
The love of Thee a Prism be
Excelling Violet
Betsy Erkkila)
lingering tropic of summer and the fleeting beauty concluded in autumn and
put to cold sleep by winter. Dickinsons garden in summer was an extension
of the artists studio of her own home. Her close observations of
woodland flowers, the migratory patterns of birds and butterflies,
represented the world as well as the soul in world (perhaps even proving
The brain is wider than the sky (# 556 J; F # 598 ). These things
provided the seed and soil metaphors ( # 862 F ) that brought forth
the flower of poetry from the garden of her imagination.
She took it seriously. She took it as profound responsibility.
NOTES:
Dickinsons glass conservatory: Built by her father for her on the south
side of the Homestead after 1855 facing High Street. It was torn down in
1915. The Dickinson Trust plans to reconstruct the conservatory some day
and to grow the flowers in it that Dickinson had, including the jasmine,
which was the first flower she grew there (and writes often mentions in her
letters).
Dickinsons Herbarium: Herbariums of pressed leaves and flowers were a
standard 19th Century methods for botany to young students so that they
learned to identify not just the parts of plants but the names of plants and
flowers themselves. Dickinsons herbarium includes over 400 plants from
the Amherst region, and is preserved in the Emily Dickinson Room of the
Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard. Visitors can also see photofacsimiles of various pages in the Houghton Library. There is also a
facsimile of the herbarium in the dining room of the Homestead in Amherst,
and one facsimile print hangs on the north wall, next to a window looking
out at the back garden, in the dining room.
GARDENS AND NATURE AS SUBJECTS: See An Emily Dickinson
Encyclopedia, edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein, Greenwood Press, 1998:
Dickinson often used gardens as microcosms of nature,' analogies of
heaven,' and representations of her soul, home,' and New England culture.
The gardens in Dickinson's poems are relatively safe and small places where
speakers can experience a tamed nature and contemplate a flower,' bind,' or
shadow or even "keep the Sabbath" (P 324). As the locus of both delight and
loss, the garden serves as a setting for musing on the sublime' and fallen
mortal world and imagining the immortal.'
The natural and supernatural mingle in gardens under the hand and gaze of
Dickinson's speakers. Dickinson's figurative gardens that she names Paradise
and Eden recall and revise the narratives of Creation and the Fall in Genesis
as well as the new heaven of Revelation. Her poems often contemplate the
nature of God' and the gender relations he established in the paradise that
Adam and Eve lost and also the nature of the paradise to be regained in
heaven.
Yet Dickinson often found paradise, Eden, and heaven on earth: she declared
to Austin' that Amherst' "seems indeed to be a bit of Eden" (L 59), and P
1408 states that "Earth is Heaven." She knew that her Puritan' ancestors had
struggled to create a Christian paradise in the New World. The Dickinson
family garden, which she called "my Puritan Garden" (L 685) and "Vinnie's'
sainted Garden" (L 885), offered privacy yet also means of keeping in touch
with the wider world. She often sent flowers and produce, along with a letter
poem, to friends' and neighbors. In the glass-walled, south facing
conservatory that her father built for her off his study, which she called "the
garden off the dining-room" (L 2?9), she brought plants and poems to life.
Paradoxes bloom in Dickinson's poetic gardens, which contain sweet and
bitter, promise and loss, growth and death. The Dickinsonian garden is a
place of possibilities; the "unexpected Maid" that the speaker of P I?
encounters in her garden may be nature, poetry,' and the speaker herself. She
cultivated a peculiar and stunning strain of Puritan, Romantic, and realistic
contemplation that probed her self and her world.
RECOMMENDED: Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of
Limitation; Margaret Homans, Woman Writers and Poetic Identity; Jean
McClure Mudge, Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home; Gary Lee
Stonum, The Dickinson Sublime.
NATURE AS SUBJECT: Dickinson won recognition as a nature poet even
in her lifetime, as newspaper editors demonstrated by titling" poems
"October," "Sunset," and "The Snake"; and all three editions of the 189Os
included sections on "Nature." Readers felt comfortable with subject matter
typically chosen by other nineteenth-century Women" poets and by
Romantics" generally. Dickinson's poems treat flowers," birds," insects,"
Edwin Marsh and the Funeral Of Emily Dickinson: When Edwin Marsh
died in December, 1913, his passing, like Emily's father's was front page
news. He was described as "warm hearted man" and the "best-liked man" in
The old Marsh account books convey the stark, business-like description of
the funeral of one of the world's great poets. To this day, the date of
Dickinson's funeral is marked by a procession and poetry readings at the
grave, site. Individuals, pairs, small groups cluster around the wrought iron
gate protecting the Dickinson family plot, contemplating Dickinson's
gravestone carved with her name, her dates and the simple but eloquent
inscription "Called Back."
Marsh's account states the cause of Emily's death as Bright's disease [this is
on her death certificate], an illness of the kidneys. Dr. Orvis Bigelow is
listed as the certifying physician, and the date of Emily's burial May 19,
1886. Perhaps the most significant fact revealed is that Emily's casket
measured 5'6 a significant figure for those eager for any clue to her
appearance. According to Robert Studley, regional manager of the Boston
funeral corporation & Ames, Inc., the poet's height would therefore 5'2" or
5'3 .
Dickinson is legendary for dressing only in white in the latter part of her life.
To this she was true even at the end, for her casket was white, it was
furnished with white flannel, and had white textile handles. Though simple,
the cost was an expensive $85.00, a time when the average casket was
bought for between $12-$35.
Before burial, Emily's casket was placed in a $5 pine box. The cost of a
flannel wrap with ribbons was $9.25, and the making of the bier on which
die casket was carried cost $2.50. No carriages were hired, no chairs were
rented or flowers bought. Yet the total cost of Emily Dickinson's funeral was
$121.75, one of the most expensive that spring.
In Amherst in the late 1800s, a pauper could be buried for $12.50 or, as in
the case of Samuel Boltwood in November of 1886, funeral costs could
mount to $423. Boltwoods casket had satin pillows, purple plush, and was
fully lined in satin. There were seven bouquets of flowers, and no fewer than
13 rented carriages. The average cost of most Amherst funerals, however,
was between $25 and $80.
Official List of Plants In Dickinsons Garden at the Dickinson Homestead
From the Dickinson Homestead Trust, Amherst, MA, 1983 Amherst, MA is
comprised of USDA hardiness zones 4 and 5 (and 6 in protected microenvironments
See Appendices with notes to myself for: Master Letters and Editions of
Dickinsons poetry.
Citatitons:
Dandurand, Karen. "New Dickinson Civil War Publications, in American
Literature 56, 1984: 17-27.
Eberwein, Jane Donahue, Editor. An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia.
Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1998.
Franklin, R.W. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition.
Cambridge, Mass. Thye Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Farr, Judith. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Grabher, Gudrun, Hagenbuchle, Roland, Miller, Cristanne editors. The Emily
Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Hamada, Sahoko Emily Dickinsons Flower Imagery; paper delivered at the
19th General Meeting of the Emily Dickinson Society of Japan, Notre Dame
Seishin University, June 21, 2003, pp.81-89.
Johnson, Thomas H. editor. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. New
York: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
_________ The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.
Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff. Emily Dickinsons Fascicles: Method and Meaning,
U Park. Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1995.
Patterson, Rebecca. Emily Dickinsons Imagery. Margaret H. Freeman,
editor. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.
Rosenbaum, Stanford Patrick. A Concordance to the Poems of Emily
Dickinson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1964.
Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994 (originally published, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1974).